Crossing the Streams
by P.H. Wise
Summary: The girl who drowned in the spring was a bit... different. This one involves Timelords, reincarnation, and a very, very annoyed Sailor Pluto. A Sailor Moon, Ranma, Doctor Who crossover. revised
1. The Best Laid Plans

Crossing the Streams  
by P.H. Wise  
A Sailor Moon, Ranma 1/2, Doctor Who crossover

Prologue: The Best Laid Plans

* * *

This is a story about a girl. Well, actually, she's a girl who is sometimes a boy. She was a boy originally, you see, but then he was cursed to turn into a girl whenever he's splashed with cold water. Except he was actually a girl originally, but then the whole bothersome reincarnation thing happened, and... have you heard this one before? Sorry. But it still holds true. It's a story about a girl, and a story about time.

Time is a funny thing. We experience it moment by moment, here and then gone, the future becomes the present becomes the past, and nobody can go backwards or forwards: we get what we get when we get it. That's the way it is, that's the way it's always been, and that's the way it always will be. But suppose there were people who weren't like that. People who didn't lose yesterday, but could travel there like it was the house across the street, loiter about in the living room, maybe make a mess of it, maybe clean things up a bit, and then come back home in time for supper. Suppose there were people who could explore tomorrow like it was Africa, wandering about like tourists through its deepest, darkest jungles, its vast plains, its vast cities. Up to the heights, down to the depths, and back again to today. Maybe they'll skip tomorrow and head clear into next week. Maybe yesterday was boring, and they'd much rather see ten years ago. It isn't like that for us, but for the Timelords, that's the way it's always been.

A long time ago, over a hundred years from now, Susan Foreman and David Campbell walked together through the mist-shrouded pools of a far distant part of the planet Earth. They had won. The Dalek invasion of the Earth had been thwarted. Susan had been left behind in the 22nd Century by her Grandfather, the Doctor, and she was determined to make a life with her love, her David. It should have been a happy time for them, and it was, for a while. Her dark hair gleamed in the fitful sunlight, peeking here and there through the misty valley. Grass grew thick all around her, as green as the deep, shining green of the English countryside. Within each pool, bamboo poles stood tall, swaying in the slight breeze. It seemed an enchanted place.

Why did she feel such a sense of trepidation here? It was lovely, and David was with her, as he had been with her every day in the two months since the Daleks had been defeated. She would never bear his children, of course, though not for lack of effort. It was impossible. They weren't the same species. But Susan Foreman didn't need to have children to be happy: she needed David... and she needed her Grandfather. He was her only family, and now he was gone.

That's funny. Was someone calling her name?

There it was again, faint, ghostlike on the wind. '_Susan..._'

"Susan, look out!" David yelled even as a man came barreling out of the mist. His face was lined with care, and his hair was more gray than black, but he was healthy, fit, and strong, clad in yellow shirt with black pants with a yellow and black spotted headband on his forehead.

"Out of the way!" the man yelled.

Susan gave a surprised yell, lost her balance, and plummeted into a nearby pool.

The man almost stopped, then. Almost went back to help her. But then the cry of a dozen angry Amazons sounded behind him, and a group of young women bearing medieval weaponry came racing out of the mist after the man. He dashed away in a panic.

"Susan!" David yelled. "Susan!" He couldn't see her. Where was she? He jumped into the pool after her, but it was deeper than it had first appeared. He found her resting on the bottom, eyes open, not moving. Even as he reached out for her, her eyes widened ever so slightly, and then... the light faded from them.

David felt a strange, tingling sensation as he pulled Susan out of the water. There, on the shores of the spring, unmindful of the changes that had occurred in his own body, he shouted her name. "SUSAN!" He tried to revive her, but to no avail. The spring had taken her.

A few moments later, the changes to his own body registered with his mind: in the 22nd Century, Nyannichuan had claimed its first victim.

The Guide found them like that half an hour later, David, now a she, weeping over the body of her dead lover. The Guide took off his hat and held it over his heart. His grandfather had often told him the tragic stories of the Pools of Sorrow. He'd never thought to see one take place before his eyes.

Time is a funny thing. We experience it moment by moment, here and then gone, the future becomes the present becomes the past, and nobody can go backwards or forwards: we get what we get when we get it. That's the way it is, that's the way it's always been, and that's the way it always will be. But for Susan Foreman, a member of the race that had mastered time and Granddaughter of the Doctor, time was a much more mutable thing. Here was one who had gone backwards and forwards in time again and again, and her body, her spirit, was charged with the power of the time vortex. That power, the power that suffused her spirit, now flowed through the Nyannichuan, bleeding backwards through time. David Campbell was the spring's first victim, but also the last. A year ago, two years ago, ten years ago, a hundred years ago, sixteen hundred years ago. It stopped there, its power petering out at last, ending over a millennia before it began, and the guide of that time saw a strange sight: a young girl in strange clothing knocked into the spring, drowning, her body fading into the mist and then gone. There, at the end, at the beginning, her spirit was released, and off it went, first to the place of waiting, and then, after many, many years – fourteen hundred and eighty four, to be exact, it was released back into the cycle of reincarnation where it belonged.

Such was the legacy of Nyannichuan.

Time is a funny, funny thing. A girl drowns in the 22nd Century, creating the Nyannichuan. The girl is reborn as a boy in the late 20th century. The boy falls into the Nyannichuan, and there, the heritage of his previous life is reawakened within him, and, thanks to the power of the cursed spring, in her as well. Elsewhere, another girl is reborn after an even longer wait between lifetimes. A whole bunch of girls, actually, heirs to the power of the Galaxy Cauldron itself. Over twenty thousand years earlier, a girl awakens to the power of Ruin, heralding the beginning of the end of the Silver Millennium. A thousand years in the future, nine girls forge the first Great and Bountiful Human Empire and its capital of Crystal Tokyo, and a few dozen years later, the forces of Nemesis lay siege to the city, sending ships back to the twentieth century to prevent it from ever being founded.

Time. People guard it, making sure that nasty things like paradoxes don't happen. Or they did, until the Time War wiped them all out. Well, almost all of them. There were some that still tried to keep things in order. One of them was even a Timelord. But not this particular one. At the Gates of Time, Sailor Pluto, one of the nine girls I mentioned earlier, guarded against the reopening of those gates, occasionally allowing what passage is necessary to prevent paradox, sometimes enjoying the paradise of Crystal Tokyo and the Great and Bountiful Human Empire, but mostly living in fear of the day when the old master of those Time Gates returns for them, and all the world comes tumbling down.

Our story begins in Nerima, where, as has often been said before, a girl and a panda were fighting in the rain. She had short dark hair that was tied back in a pigtail, and she looked more Saxon than Japanese, but she was wearing a red Chinese silk shirt with black pants and black slippers. The panda, on the other hand, was wearing a ratty old gi, which certainly isn't what you'd expect a panda to wear.

A few days later, a young doctor puzzled over the results of his examination of one Ranma Saotome. Her pressure points were all wrong. Her ki pathways didn't do what they're supposed to do, and were in different places within her body. And she had two hearts.

Now what did that remind him of?

Doctor Tofu's eyes widened. He dashed into his office and dug through his old things. He hadn't always been a chiropractor, after all. Doctor/Patient confidentiality was one thing, but this – this could be very, very important. He knew who to call about a thing like this.

A call was sent out, and the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce was very interested to learn what Tofu had discovered. Surveillance began two days later, made easier by the willingness of one Nabiki Tendo to sell photographs and video recordings of her sister's fiancé.

So it went for nearly six months, the presence of a Gallifreyan in one form or another drawing all sorts of chaos to Nerima. So begins our tale; a tale of 'the best laid plans of mice and men,' and the way they 'gang aft agley.' A tale of a boy who was also a girl, of a Doctor from Gallifrey without a name who was also a Grandfather, no matter how much or how often his face had changed since that time, and the tale of an ordinary girl from London. Together, their actions would shake the foundations of world. It all began, as many stories do these days, with a girl and a panda. The future, the past, the present, all united with a girl and a panda, fighting in the rain.

END PROLOGUE

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Author's notes: I'm still working on Reflections of Ruin, but this is an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while, and I figured I may as well post the Prologue. I'll work on it whenever I have time, but I fully intend to finish Reflections of Ruin, so no worries about it going unattended.

As for the title, it's a very bad pun, I know. For the record, no, this is not a Ghostbusters crossover.


	2. Ordinary World

Morning dawned in the life of Ranma Saotome, and as was habitual, he was awakened by a bucket of cold water to the face. Nothing out of the ordinary here. All in all, par for course if you were an aqua-transsexual martial artist. Right. A what now? Say it with me: 'Aqua-transsexual.' Most people, they get a bucket of cold water to the face and all they do is splutter. Ranma on the other hand, he transforms. The cold tingle of the transformation rippled across his body, softening his angles into curves, shifting his weight around, and making two very visible alterations in the chest area and one less visible but no less significant alteration to the pelvis. The new form looked much like a female version of the old – what the boy would have looked like had he been born a she - but not exactly. There were certain differences that could not be accounted for. Her hair was still dark, so there was that, but her features, while still somewhat oriental, were now only maybe half Japanese at best: a mix of Japanese and something else. If a person didn't know better, they'd say it was probably British ancestry. The eyes were the same, at least. A deep, shining blue.

That was when he, now a she, spluttered angrily. "What'd you do that for!?"

It seems there are some universals after all.

Ranma glared at... well, that was a surprise. It wasn't her fiancé who'd splashed her this morning, but rather her father – Genma Saotome – who even now held the bucket he had flung into his son-turned-daughter's face. "Baka Oyaji!" Ranma hissed, and leaped to her feet just in time to get punted out the open window. She did a double back flip before landing gracefully on the boulder overlooking the koi pond.

Genma went leaping out after her, coming down with a tremendous flying kick.

Ranma shifted to the side, and Genma planted his foot in the boulder. Ranma took the opportunity to deliver a vicious snap-kick to Genma's jaw, sending the older man flying up, up, up into the air. Still, what goes up must come down. Gravity, that is. Down he went, landing in the koi pond with a tremendous splash. Instant panda.

See, Ranma's not the only one who transforms when splashed. But of course, you probably know all that. Still, even if you're familiar with it, it is a bit odd, boys turning into girls and men turning into pandas and piglets and ducks and yeti-bull-eel-crane combinations. No, Ranma had never been normal, and never would be. But as she finally defeated her father and strode into the house to eat breakfast (and to change back into a boy), she didn't much care.

Or could you imagine Ranma the ordinary boy? Or the ordinary girl? Ranma the boy who goes to school and does his chores and comes home at night with a long career as a cubicle worker to look forward to? Ranma the salary man? How about Ranma the housewife, settling down with some man and giving birth to some odd number of children? Ranma the husband, who marries his sweetheart, settles down and raises a family, Ranma the father to two point five children? Ranma the grandmother or grandfather, utterly senile, forgotten by his family who mourn her senility like he had died before her body had actually quit? Ranma Saotome, dying alone in some retirement home somewhere?

No?

Well, neither could Ranma. Whatever else she knew, the pigtailed girl at least knew this much: she was meant for something other than a normal life, and the universe, it seemed, agreed. If there was a monster to be found, she was the one who found it and fought it. If there was a Chinese prince looking for a bride, it was Ranma's fiancé that they took. All this strangeness, all this insanity, transformations and high powered martial arts battles, all this chaos, it was normal for Ranma. Par for course. It had always been that way, as long as Ranma could remember, and despite all the problems that cropped up, she, now a he once more, wouldn't have it any other way.

* * *

Crossing the Streams  
by P.H. Wise  
A Sailor Moon, Ranma 1/2, Doctor Who crossover

Chapter 01: Ordinary World

Disclaimer: I don't own Ranma. I don't own Sailor Moon. The BBC owns Doctor Who. Please don't sue me.

* * *

The sun was already trudging its way on up into the sky when Ranma and Akane left for class that morning. They took their usual route, running along next to the canal, with Ranma, a boy once again, racing along the top of the fence that overlooked said canal. The air was bright; the smog-haze had been lifted by the recent rains, and puddles still lined the streets like little mirrors, shining in the sunlight.

"Hurry up, dummy!" Akane called irritably. "We're going to be late!"

Ranma smirked confidently. "Ain't no way we're gonna be late today. I got a plan." And so he did. He had it all planned out. First he'd dodge the sprinklers, then he'd roof-hop past the kids having a water-fight in their front yard. From there, he'd have to return to street level to avoid the faulty pipes on the roof of the old curio shop. He'd then roll underneath the hose spray of the old man who would be watering his garden right about this time, and then it was just a matter of dashing the last hundred yards to the school. No problem at all. Still, as he carried out his plan, he couldn't help but feel a nagging sensation like he'd forgotten something. Something important.

As the pigtailed boy evaded the sprinklers and took to the rooftops, Akane shook her head incredulously. "Showoff," she groused, and began what to anyone else would have been a mad dash but was to a Neriman martial artist (even one of the weaker ones, like her,) a brisk jog, in order to keep up.

Ranma exulted in his own physical prowess. It was working! He'd finally get to school without transforming even once! And he'd make it on time, too! A thrill shot through him even as he rolled underneath the hose-spray of the old man who was watering his garden. He came up smoothly to his feet and dashed on after Akane, who was almost to the school gates now.

Then he realized what he'd forgotten - the one variable he'd failed to take into account.

The ladle lady.

With the flick of her elderly wrist, she decided Ranma's fate. The pigtailed boy got a face full of cold water, and skidded to a halt in front of the school.

Akane laughed, and rushed inside just in time. "Serves you right for showing off!" she called over her shoulder, amusement in her voice.

Ranma clenched her fist. Someday – she wasn't sure when or how – she'd figure out the ladle lady. Someday, she'd finally beat the old woman's invincible water-toss technique, or her name wasn't Ranma Saotome. Someday...

The school bell rang, announcing Ranma's tardiness to the world.

"Aw, that ain't fair!" she said to no one in particular. She walked into the school and soon afterwards was set to the undignified (yet ever so familiar) task of holding buckets in the hall.

"I told you, you should have left earlier," Akane said as Ranma trudged past her desk on the way back into the hallway, buckets in hand.

Ranma shot Akane a withering look, and for once, kept her big mouth shut.

It was an odd sort of day after that point. Once the teacher gave her permission, Ranma walked back into the class, but she did it with a strange sense of detachment. Not that it was unusual for her to not pay attention to her class, but this was a bit odder than usual. Today was too ordinary. Too... normal. Well, normal for Ranma. On top of that, there hadn't been any major challengers for at least a week. That was always a bad sign. Even worse, Kuno hadn't been there to challenge them when they'd arrived at school. It felt like... well, no matter. Perhaps the day would pick up as it went on. Maybe that would drive away the sense of impending doom.

Hours passed, and teachers rotated through the classroom as the subjects changed. Hinako-Sensei came and went, and not a single student was drained. Lunch arrived with nothing in particular happening, and Ranma took the opportunity to change back into a he. He even managed to stay that way clear through Gym and into the beginning of math class – the last class of the day, when Hiroshi, coming back in from the restroom, tripped and fell over his own desk, sending his open water bottle flying into Ranma's lap. Still, that wasn't particularly unusual. Unusual would have been it not happening. So why did she feel like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop? Why did she feel like she was stuck between the tick and the tock? And why was the rest of the class staring at her like that?

Ranma took a mental stock of her recent memories. Let's see. Walk into class on autopilot and plop down in his usual chair. Ignore the math teacher as usual. Get splashed by Hiroshi. Continue ignoring the math teacher. Get called up to plot a point on a graph. Plot a five dimensional point in space/time. Go back to her seat. Continue ignoring the...

Wait a minute.

A five dimensional point in space/time? Where had that come from? OK. Right. Don't panic. So she had known how to plot a five dimensional point in space/time. That wasn't anything weird, was it?

"Ranma," Akane breathed, stunned. "What is that?"

Ranma looked at the equations on the board, scratched the base of her pigtail, and shrugged. Wherever that strange detached feeling had come from, it was gone now. The equations might as well have been chicken-scratches for all the sense she could make of them. "Uh, math?" she asked.

"This isn't just math," the teacher – Nakamura-sensei - said, staring at the board. "This is... well, I don't know what this is! This is revolutionary! How did..." He trailed off, then quickly produced a cell phone and took a photograph of the blackboard. He glanced down at the display on his phone, took a few more pictures, and then, satisfied with the clarity of the photos, shook his head incredulously. "Class is dismissed early," he said. "All of you, go home." He glanced at Ranma. "Except you, Saotome. You stay for a moment."

The class exchanged glances, and then rose, bowed, and filed out one by one.

All, that is, except for Ranma and Akane.

"Tendo-san," Nakamura-sensei said, looking somewhat annoyed, "You can go. I'll only be a moment." He was a large, unpleasant man, and prone to gas. He was bald, but what hair he did have was dark. He usually dressed in business suits designed to disguise his girth.

Akane gave the teacher a doubtful look, then rose to her feet and headed towards the door. "See you at home, Ranma," she said.

"Yeah, whatever." Ranma replied insensitively.

Akane stiffened ever so slightly at that and didn't look at the pigtailed girl as she strode out of the classroom.

Silence fell over the classroom for about a minute as the teacher waited for Akane to leave the building. Finally, he was satisfied. "So, Saotome-san," Nakamura-sensei said. "It seems you've been hiding something."

Ranma gave the teacher a nonplused look. "Uh, I guess?"

"Where did you learn to do that sort of math problem, Saotome-san?"

Ranma looked at the problem on the board. It still looked like chicken-scratches to her. Although... no. Chicken-scratches. "Uh, I ain't got no idea how ta do that, uh, that kind of problem."

Nakamura strode up to the blackboard. "Then where did this come from, Saotome-san?" he asked in a low, dangerous tone.

Everything seemed to shift, then. Ranma's danger sense went wild: the teacher was radiating ki charged with the intent to kill. She grew nervous, being unused to such feelings being radiated by teachers. "It just came out, uh, Nakamura-sensei. I dunno where it came from." She rose to her feet.

Nakamura farted loudly, but neither he nor Ranma commented on it. Ranma caught a faint smell – it wasn't methane, but something like bad breath.

"I have a proposal for you, Saotome. You help me, and I let you live."

Ranma laughed. Who did this teacher think he was talking to? By the way he was standing, Ranma could tell that he didn't even know martial arts!

"You think your survival is funny? That's fine. So do I. I don't know how you did that problem, Saotome, but the knowledge is locked in your head somewhere, and I mean to have it out. So it's your choice: do you surrender it voluntarily, or do I have to extract your brain and download the information directly?"

Ranma dropped into a fighting stance. "Bring it on," she taunted.

Nakamura charged.

Two seconds and one swift kick to the face later, Nakamura went flying back the way he came and crashed into the blackboard with a meaty thud.

Ranma lowered her leg and straightened up. "Geez, I was right. He's got no training at all! What a wimp!"

Nakamura began to laugh.

"Somethin' funny, Sensei?" Ranma asked.

Nakamura reached up and pulled a small strip of flesh off his forehead, revealing... a bright, shining blue light beneath. "It's been a long time since I've had a chance to step out of the disguise," he said, grinning widely. "My ship's navigation computer was damaged, but the math problem you produced on the board should be enough for me to plot my own course home. Not as reliably as if you had helped, but it should work. I was going to arrest them and bring them back for trial, but I'm fed up with this stupid place and you stupid people: the Slitheen family can burn this rock to cinders for all I care." His flesh began to fall off.

"What the hell!?" Ranma exclaimed, backing away from the transforming teacher.

The Nakamura-suit fell off, and a massive, bipedal, green-skinned alien with huge claws on its forelimbs rose to its full, eight foot height. "Let's see how you deal with a Raxacoricofallapatorian!" he bellowed.

Ranma blinked. "Hold on. A what?"

The monster blinked, and looked at Ranma, clearly annoyed. "Raxacoricofallapatorian."

"Raxacori...fallo...thingy?"

"Raxacoricofallapatorian!" the monster snapped. "It's not that hard, girl! Even a stupid monkey like you should be able to pronounce it."

Stupid monkey? OK, stupid she could buy, but monkey? Ranma glared at the monster, feeling considerably less charitable towards the thing. "Raxicoricoreallystupidname," she sneered.

"AAAAAAAAGH! DIE!" The monster charged once more.

This time, Ranma's kick only launched the monster about half as far: in its true form, the Raxacoricofallapatorian was considerably better able to resist kinetic impact than when its compression field was in use to allow it to fit inside its human skin suit. Still, the thing was uncommonly pleased at the thought that here, at last, was prey that would be worth the hunt. It told Ranma so. "Here," it said, "At last, is a prey that is worth the hunt!" See? There you are then.

Again and again, the alien lunged at Ranma, and again and again she shifted to the side and watched as it smashed headlong through desks and into walls. It was strong and it was powerful, and it moved with the instinctive grace of a natural predator, but it had little skill in the martial arts. After about two minutes of this, Ranma yawned visibly, which further enraged the creature.

A minute later, Ranma was visibly putting as little effort as possible into foiling the creature's every attempt to attack her. Finally, the thing that had been Nakamura-sensei collapsed onto the teacher's desk, breathing hard. "Damn you, girl. You..." It wheezed. "You haven't beaten me yet!"

Ranma cocked her head to the side, considering the alien. "I gotta say, as aliens go, you really suck," she said helpfully. "Probably all the doughnuts ya eat before class. You should go easy on that sort of thing, ya know. Get some exercise. Work out. Maybe take some martial arts classes. As is, hell, even Akane could probably beat ya." Ranma pulled out a business card – the first of a batch that Nabiki had made up. "Here. If ya ever get enough trainin' to be worth the trouble, come on by." She handed the business card to the exhausted alien, who took it with a clawed hand and looked down at it incredulously.

'Ranma Saotome – Saotome Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu - Tendo Dojo – To defeat the owner in savage combat, please use rear entrance.'

"Anyways," Ranma said, "This is lame. I'm outta here." She walked over to the window, slid it open, and hopped out.

The creature that had been Nakamura rushed to the window and gazed down just in time to see the pigtailed girl land gracefully in the courtyard below. It stared after her, not able to quite believe what had just happened. Then it looked furtively around, picked up its Nakamura-suit, and began the arduous process of putting the blasted thing back on. Screw this miserable planet. It was time to leave.

Maybe it would blast the Tendo Dojo to rubble once it was in orbit.

It's funny the kind of things that completely change the shape of our destiny. Take Ranma for example. He never would have imagined that his actions that day would bring his safe, wonderful, chaotic world of martial arts mayhem to an abrupt end. After all, what's an alien in a world like his? Surely nothing special. And he wasn't, really. The alien that had taken the body of Nakamura-sensei was quite an unsuccessful Detective back on Raxicoricofallapatorius, and had only really come to Earth hunting the Slitheen family on something of a lark gone wrong: the chances of actually finding them here were nearly astronomically low, but if it got him an all-expense paid vacation courtesy of the Raxacoricofallapatorian police force, well, who was he to argue? He'd certainly never expected to get stuck here with a faulty navigational computer. Still, in a way, he was grateful to the Saotome girl. Boy. Whatever it was. And there was another thing. What kind of species changed so freely between male and female? It was unnatural, it was. The sooner he was out of here, the better. In any case, he was grateful. That equation had given him just what he needed to extrapolate the route from here back to his home, with or without the navigational computer. He'd be sure to thank the girl by blasting her home to dust once he was in orbit. So he thought, and muttered to himself, even as he boarded his ship (cloaked on the roof of Furinkan high) and began the long process of powering it up from sleep/hide mode into full active functionality.

If Ranma hadn't plotted a five dimensional point in space/time, the alien would not have decided to leave the Earth that day. If Ranma hadn't then proceeded to utterly humiliate a very proud member of a very proud race of hunters and defile the ritual hunt with his flippancy, the Raxacoricofallapatorian might well have not departed in such an angry huff. And then, everything would have been different. On any other day, this would not have been any big deal. He would have powered up and been gone (and possibly have destroyed the Tendo Dojo from orbit). On this day, however, a small fleet of Black Moon starships were hovering in the clouds above Tokyo. Their focus had been on the Minato ward where their enemies, the Sailor Senshi, were even now fighting a small force of droids in an effort to prevent a Crystal Point from being corrupted. Their sensors detected the Raxacoricofallapatorian ship powering up, and immediately one of them flew off towards Nerima to investigate.

The great crystal ship descended through the clouds above Nerima and hovered just above the power source it had detected – just above Furinkan high school. Unfortunately for both ships involved, the Raxacoricofallapatorian ship's sensors had been damaged when it had first landed on Earth, and now had a blind spot in precisely the area that the Black Moon ship now occupied. Even more unfortunately for both ships involved, the Black Moon ship's sensors could detect only an unusual energy source, and could not otherwise detect the presence of the ship below. Even more unfortunately for both ships involved, the Raxacoricofallapatorian formerly known as Nakamura-sensei chose precisely that moment to blast off into orbit.

The ships collided with a terrible roar – the mingled sound of tearing metal and shattering crystal. A great crystal spire went right through the main engines of the Raxacoricofallapatorian vessel, and the bow of the Raxacoricofallapatorian ship smashed right through the central crystal core of the Black Moon vessel. To make a long story short, both ships in short order fell flaming headlong back to Earth and smashed into Furinkan high school with a tremendous, earth-cracking boom. Then, for good measure, they both exploded, sending debris flying halfway across the Nerima ward, but mostly just making a total mess of the Furinkan high school campus.

Word of a crashed alien spaceship quickly found the ears of those that listened for such things (and really, if it was going to happen, it would probably happen in Nerima: it was that sort of place). The news media quickly descended upon the site, and soon the whole nation was up in arms over what the government was attempting to explain away by mentioning something about swamp gas, a weather balloon, and the reflection of Venus.

None of that mattered to Ranma, of course, who was generally ignoring the tremendous events that had occurred as a direct result of her actions earlier that day.

"Tadaima," Ranma called absently as she walked in the front door, taking a moment to kick off her slippers and put on indoor shoes.

For a moment, there was no response. The front room was dark, and a faint glow was coming from the TV room. "Okairi," Kasumi called at last.

Ranma walked into the TV room. There, Akane, Nabiki and Kasumi sat glued to the television set. "What's going on?" she asked.

"Ranma! You're ok!" Akane exclaimed.

"Uh, yeah. I'm fine. What's the big deal?"

Akane pointed, and Ranma looked at the television screen. All of Furinkan was in flames.

"Huh," Ranma said intelligently.

"'Huh?'" Akane asked. "That's all you can say? 'Huh?' You were just there, dummy! You could have..." she trailed off. Fortunately for the illusion of her not being interested in Ranma, Ranma wasn't paying attention.

"I wonder if Nakamura-sensei being an alien and all, uh, maybe he crashed his ship or somethin'," Ranma mused.

"Nakamura-sensei is an alien?" Akane asked.

"Yeah. A pretty lame one, too. Even you could probably beat him, tomboy."

Some things, it seemed, never changed.

Ranma soon lost interest in the events and wandered off in search of warm water, but Akane, Nabiki and Kasumi sat glued to the television as the story unfolded. Even Mousse, Shampoo, and Ukyou took the time to watch history play out before their eyes: this was quite possibly the first contact with an alien species in the history of the human race. Well, second if you counted that nonsense over in England, but the Japanese generally didn't.

What did matter to Ranma, though he didn't know it yet, was what happened next.

Far away, within a particular Time And Relative Dimension In Space, the Doctor blinked as he looked up at the image being projected on his view screen. Space ship crash in Tokyo? Huh. That's interesting. He didn't remember that happening. He was sure he would have remembered something like that happening so soon after he'd met... no, he wasn't going to think about her right now. He'd only just dealt with Doctor Lazarus, and with Martha joining him full time, it wouldn't do to get all down again. Not now.

Speaking of Martha, she was only just now walking into the main room of the TARDIS, suitcase in hand. She was a lovely young woman, with dusky skin, dark hair, and captivating brown eyes. "Doctor?" she asked, her distinctly London accent filling the TARDIS. "What's that, then? You've got a telly in here?"

The Doctor looked up, instantly cheerful. "No, of course not! I'd never have something as ordinary as 'television' on the TARDIS. Not me. It's a chrono-lens!"

"Really? What's that?"

The Doctor shrugged, smiling a faintly goofy smile. "I don't know. I just made it up. It's a good name, though, isn't it? No, I'm watching the view screen, of course."

"The view screen? Your view screen is a telly? Do you get Sky Movies?"

The Doctor nodded enthusiastically. "No," he said, and Martha's face fell ever so slightly. "But I apparently do pick up 'Galaxy Television' out of Japan. In this case, it's a signal from, oh, two years ago. Maybe three."

"And that's normal?" Martha asked incredulously. Sure, she had seen some truly odd things so far traveling with the Doctor, but watching the telly in the TARDIS just seemed downright weird – even for the Doctor.

"What? No. Totally beyond the pale. Of course, it's a great idea. I should think about that. But no, not normal at all. Which is why..."

Martha smiled, cutting the Doctor off. "I've always wanted to visit Japan," she said.

"Oh, it's a lovely place! Lovely people. Just absolutely lovely." He began flipping switches on the TARDIS's main console. "Right now, something is displacing a television signal two years through time, and we're going to find out what." He looked at the burning wreckage displayed on the Japanese news program – apparently a place called Furinkan high school in the Nerima ward of Tokyo. He put on faux-gentlemanly mannerisms and asked, "Would you care to accompany me to Tokyo, Miss Jones?"

Martha nodded. "I'd love to, Mister Smith," she replied. His name wasn't Smith, but it was something of a private joke between them.

The whole room shuddered, and the distinctive sound of the TARDIS in transit filled the air: they were off. They were off, and though he didn't know it yet, for a certain pig-tailed martial artist, nothing would ever be the same.

END CHAPTER 01

* * *

Author's notes:

So it begins. The first chapter is a bit shorter than I wanted (actually ten pages shorter than I wanted), but ah well. I can always make the next ones longer. They cover more material in any case.


	3. The Black Moon Invasion

Crossing the Streams  
by P.H. Wise  
A Sailor Moon, Ranma 1/2, Doctor Who crossover

Chapter 02: The Black Moon Invasion

Disclaimer: I don't own Ranma. I don't own Sailor Moon. The BBC owns Doctor Who. Please don't sue me.

--

Morning dawned at the Tendo home, and for once, it was accompanied by no splashes, no sounds of combat, nothing to disturb the peace of the morning. The dawn-light poured out across the yard like a love song in the spring: a simple, clear, bright, strangely moving thing. Light rippled across the bottom of the koi pond in queer, undulating patterns, for once undisturbed by the morning ritual of the Saotome men.

6:00 AM passed, and in the guest room, Ranma snored loudly. A narrow band of the morning light appeared on the far wall. 7:00 AM passed, and Ranma didn't wake. No bucket of cold water flew into his face, and no pandas were on hand to fling him out the window. The band of morning light, brighter now, lit up a large patch of the wall. 8:00 AM passed, and the light advanced, and Ranma slept. 9:00 AM passed, and the light advanced, and Ranma slept. Finally, at 10:00 AM, the light fell upon the sleeping boy's face, and the sudden warmth made him flinch. He awoke, and sat up, and blinked confusedly at the clock. Ten o'clock? Nobody had woken him? He'd slept in? What was this? That... was this restfulness? What a strange feeling. Feeling totally rested and relaxed, Ranma got out of bed and got ready for his day.

Some time later, washed and dressed, and having changed gender twice in the process, Ranma walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. The table was clear, and the dishes were done. Breakfast had come and gone. Ranma opened the refrigerator.

No luck. There weren't any leftovers. Frowning an annoyed sort of frown, he made himself a cup of instant noodles. The television was on in the living room, so once the noodles were done, he walked out to investigate. Akane, Nabiki and Kasumi were there, sitting on the couch, watching the television.

"Ohayo," Ranma called.

No response.

"... cause of the crash is still unclear, but one thing is certain: we are not alone in the universe. This is a momentous day for humanity, and for the Japanese people..." the sound of a talking head came out from the TV as a sort of background radiation – present but (to Ranma, at least) imperceptible.

"Hey," Ranma said.

The girls ignored him, and stared away at the television. Commentators were all weighing in, making speeches, and arguing about the importance of the event in the history of the world, but all Ranma heard was, 'Blah blah blah, something something huge significant event, Americans baffled, some Prime Minister of Britain or Germany or something named Harriet Jones claims the whole thing is a hoax, blah blah blah.'

"I can't believe it," Akane whispered, staring at the TV in shock. "Nabiki, aliens crash-landed on our school!"

Nabiki nodded mutely.

"Bah," Ranma said irritatedly, "Those aliens were lame. Just a bunch of stupid, fat, gassy, green-skinned things with claws."

The girls ignored him.

Ranma grew even more irritated. He downed the rest of his noodles in one long slurp, put the box down on a small desk, and glared at Akane's back. After a moment, he redirected his attention to the television, and was very quickly bored to tears. Gah, how could they watch that? A bunch of talking heads yappin' on about how significant it was that some lame alien had crashed his ship into the school? That was the most idiotic thing he'd ever heard of.

Finally, thoughtlessly, and only because he was so bored that he just wanted something to happen, even if it was negative, he opened his big mouth one more time: "Geez, Akane, are you going to sit there all day? You'll never get a husband if you're a couch potato." As soon as he'd said it, he regretted it, but no one had ever accused Ranma of being the most thoughtful person in the world.

The whole temperature of the room dropped. Akane whirled around, glared at Ranma, and promptly booted him through the far wall with a cry of, "RANMA NO BAKA!"

On the plus side, she booted him through an exit hole that had already been made (and not yet repaired) the previous day. On the minus side, she put a serious amount of power behind that hit, and Ranma went flying clear into the street. Immediately, he was attacked by Ryouga, who just happened to be passing by at that moment, and overheard Ranma's careless words.

"Ranma! How dare you say such a thing to Akane! You must not have any heart at all!" Ryouga began to glow with a terrible green light.

Ranma landed easily in the street and dropped into a fighting stance. "Ah, shuddup pigboy. What do you know?"

Both of them burst into action simultaneously, Ranma leaping up into the air and angling his descent to come down in a flying kick aimed right for Ryouga's head, and Ryouga bringing up his hands and crying, "SHI SHI HOKODAN!" and sending an intense blast of green-tinged energy flying directly into Ranma's face.

The blast was angled upwards, and the impact of it (and subsequent detonation) was more than enough to fling the pig-tailed boy several hundred feet up into the air. Ranma snorted irritatedly.

It was then that he landed on the shoulders of a strange, green-haired girl in a tiger-striped bikini.

"What in the...?" Her eyes focused on Ranma, and she glared. "LET ME GO!" she yelled. "Only Darling allowed to touch me like that!" She immediately soared upwards, intent on forcing Ranma to let go by pure wind-shear. To make matters worse, her inflection was the most annoyingly saccharine Ranma had ever heard: she referred to herself as 'uchi,' and ended her sentence with 'datcha.'

For his part, Ranma wasn't quite ready to drop from such a height, and he held on to the girl as best he could. "HEY! Look, I ain't tryin' ta grope ya or nothin', I just don't wanna..." The girl wasn't listening, and to be fair, Ranma was squashing her breasts with his left forearm (his right arm was wrapped around the girl's neck octopus-like).

Electricity began to crackle around the girl's body, and Ranma grew nervous. A moment later, the girl flung her arms apart violently. Ranma lost his grip for a split second, but that was all the girl needed – she promptly punted him skyward, and off he went. A distant cry of "DIVINE RETRIBUTION!" sounded, and there was a crackle of electricity, but Ranma was already gone – out of range.

The ground vanished beneath the pigtailed boy as he soared, up, up, up and through the cloud layer. The clouds were sparse, but Ranma managed to pass through one of them regardless, and its moisture quickly soaked into his skin. The familiar tingle of the transformation flowed over him as his features shifted visibly into her features. For one brief, glorious moment, the lovely dark-haired girl that Ranma had become stood at the apex of the world, her feet planted upon the clouds themselves, with all the glorious, impossibly clear blue sky stretched out like a canvas above her. In that moment, she felt a wild, desperate thrill of absolute freedom, and it nearly overwhelmed her. Then it was gone. Down, down, back through the clouds, back towards the city far below...

On the plus side, at least she wasn't bored anymore.

--

Meanwhile, some three blocks away from the still burning Furinkan high school, the TARDIS began its materialization process, the old police box fading into view with a high pitched, pulsing sort of whine. The firefighters, still working to contain the blaze, paid the new arrival little mind. Why? Well, frankly, this was Nerima, and they'd seen weirder. A moment later, a handsome man in a dark brown pin-striped suit with a light brown overcoat stepped out of the police box, followed by an attractive young woman with dusky skin in black slacks, a turquoise sort of blouse, and a red leather jacket that zipped up the middle.

Martha and the Doctor had arrived.

Martha glanced about, quickly surveying the neighborhood. "So this is Japan, is it?" she asked.

The Doctor grinned a boyish sort of grin. "That it is. Land of the Rising Sun and all that. And the time is..." he checked his watch, "Two years before we left. Bet you never thought you'd see 2005 again."

Martha couldn't help it. She grinned too. "Can't say as I did, what with the year having gone by and all."

"I once visited the same year a hundred and eighty seven times," The Doctor said absently. "Except each day was totally out of order. Drove me half mad, trying to remember which events had happened, which ones hadn't. I'm never doing that again, let me tell you." He looked thoughtful. "Of course, if I hadn't, I'd have missed out on seeing a young man slow down time on the Tokyo subway.

Martha looked at the Doctor incredulously. "You're joking."

The Doctor looked at her with a dreadfully serious look.

"OK. Not joking." She assimilated the data. Someone in Japan can slow down the flow of time. "Why'd he want to make time go more slowly?"

"I don't know. Didn't ask. Still, he was so excited about it, I didn't have the heart to tell him not to do it again. I think he was in New York last time I looked."

Martha filed that away under 'weird knowledge gained while listening to the Doctor's babbling.'

"Excuse me," a male voice said in heavily accented English – an effect of the TARDIS. All languages heard by those who traveled in the TARDIS were automatically translated into the native tongue of the hearer, and all languages spoken by the travelers were translated into the native tongues of those who heard them speak. They heard English, but the man was speaking Japanese. The man heard British-accented Japanese, but they were really speaking English.

Martha looked up. There, standing some ten feet away, was a member of the Tokyo police force. He was a clean-shaven, respectable looking middle-aged Japanese man, his face slightly weathered by his long years of service, and his countenance a noble one.

"Hello!" the Doctor said cheerfully.

"Ah, hello," the police officer said. "My name is Officer Yamada. May I see your permit?"

"Our permit?" Martha asked. She glanced at the Doctor. "What's he talking about?"

The Doctor shrugged. "I don't know." He looked at the officer. "Permit?"

Officer Yamada nodded. "You need a permit to park a Class V interplanetary vessel on a street in the Nerima ward."

"You get a lot of our sort in this ward?" the Doctor asked. Anyone else would be totally nonplused, but the Doctor reacted as if it were just another day of the week.

"We get our fair share, sir," Yamada said. "It's pretty rare anywhere else. Well, except Minato. I hear they've been having all sorts of trouble with alien ships flitting about lately, causing trouble, all sorts of nasty pranks."

Martha gave the police officer an incredulous look. "And this is normal here? The rest of the world doesn't find out about this?"

Officer Yamada smiled sedately. "This is Nerima, miss," he said, as if that explained everything."

"Right," said the Doctor, "Permit." He began searching through his pockets. "Let me see here. Ah, here it is." He pulled out his psychic paper badge and held it up for the officer. "See? Right there. General use starship parking permit for the ward of Nerima."

The officer studied the blank badge for a moment, his mind filling in the details on the psychic paper that he expected to see. Then he nodded. "Right then. Everything seems to be in order. Good day to you both, and enjoy your stay in Japan." He tipped his hat, turned smoothly, and walked back to the emergency crew that was still at work on the fire.

"OK," Martha said. "That was weird."

"What, that?" The Doctor asked. "Nah. That barely surpasses moderately normal." He rubbed his eyes and looked about, taking in the burning building, the other buildings close to it, the nearby canal. Something really was strange here, whatever he might say. An odd sort of sense behind his eyes. Something familiar.

At that moment, a dark-haired girl in a red silk shirt and black pants fell from the sky and smashed heavily into the sidewalk not five feet from where the Doctor was standing. The pavement cracked visibly beneath the impact.

The Doctor met Martha's gaze. "That, on the other hand, is weird."

--

It's funny how fate works. Sometimes, our every step seems filled with purpose. Sometimes, you might actually buy the whole idea of predestination. You walk the path set before you, and step by step you get where you were meant to go. It's enough to make a man change his whole eschatology, or even buy the idea of eschatology in the first place. Of course, sometimes Fortune doesn't quite work that way. Sometimes, instead of walking step by step up a mountain, you get booted out into the street, blasted into the sky, and then punted into the stratosphere by an angry alien. And sometimes, you just plain crater right into the place where you're supposed to be. So it was with Ranma.

It was all dark. Darkness here, darkness there, darkness everywhere. There was darkness in a box, there was darkness with a fox. No green eggs and ham, though. Anyways, there was lots of dark. Then there was pain. Pain in the head. 'Hey, wait, I have a head?' Ranma thought. With the thought, her awareness and her sense of self reasserted themselves. It was still dark, but that was because her eyes were closed. Her head hurt, but that was because it was currently embedded in the pavement. Wait, scratch that. It was on some kind of cushion. Weird.

Sound intruded into Ranma's experience next. A woman was speaking in accented Japanese: "She's alive! That's amazing! One in a million, her surviving a fall like that!" There was pressure on her wrist for a moment. "Pulse seems normal."

Whoever it was, she was British. Ranma opened her eyes and sat up. Or rather, she tried to. Opening her eyes worked well enough, but the blinding light and indistinct shapes combined with the intense vertigo that flooded through her body when she moved discouraged her from the whole 'sitting up' bit.

"Easy, easy, you've had a nasty fall," the woman's voice said. "I'm Martha. This is the Doctor. I'm going to help you. You have a concussion, miss. Don't try to move. Doctor, can you call for the paramedics?"

After a moment, the light and shapes resolved into two recognizable figures: a beautiful dark skinned young woman with compassionate brown eyes knelt down over him, and the sun shone behind her. She had a very sharp, intelligent look to her. The other figure was a young man in a brown coat and a pin-striped suit. That's strange. He looked vaguely familiar. And he was staring at her, his face almost totally white.

"...Susan?" he asked, staring at her as if she were a ghost.

That name tugged at Ranma's memory, but she didn't know any Susans as far as she could recall. "Ow," she said. "Anyone get the number of that... Oni girl?"

Martha looked confusedly at the Doctor. "Do you know this girl?" she asked.

"Maybe," the Doctor said, not looking away from Ranma. His eyes narrowed.

"Uh, do I know you?" Ranma asked. She once again tried to sit up, and this time she succeeded: the nausea had faded significantly, and her head didn't hurt anywhere near so much.

"Hey!" Martha said sharply. "You shouldn't be trying to move yet, Miss..." she looked at Ranma expectantly.

"Ranma," Ranma said, and she didn't notice the Doctor mouthing the name, a vaguely puzzled look on his face.

"Ranma. You've taken a bad fall, you've definitely got a concussion, and we don't yet know if you've got any bones broken..."

"I'm fine," Ranma said, rolling her eyes good naturedly. It was always this way when someone hadn't seen her rapid healing rate before. "See? Look, no concussion."

Martha looked closely into Ranma's eyes, and then blinked in surprise. "Her pupils, Doctor," she said. "A moment ago, they were each a different size. Now..."

"They're back to normal, yes. That's weird." The Doctor produced a strange rod-like device with a light on the end of it, pointed it at Ranma, and activated it. It whined irritatingly for a moment.

"See?" Ranma said. "I'm fine. Thanks for the help, uh, Martha, but I'm all better now."

The Doctor looked at Ranma crossways. "So," he said, "Ranma," when he spoke the name, he looked as if he had just eaten something sour, "Did you know that you're leaking a considerable amount of energy?"

Ranma blinked. Leaking energy? What was this about? Could the Doctor be sensing her ki? "Uh, no?"

The Doctor nodded. "Yes, great big gouts of it, saturating your cells, leaking out into the air. You're lucky this area has lots of odd energy sources, or people might have noticed much earlier. Bad sorts of people."

Ranma raised an eyebrow. That sounded vaguely like a challenge, but it wasn't quite there. Still, it definitely riled her pride a bit. "Oh yeah?" she asked, rising to her feet, now fully healed. "What kind of people?"

The Doctor pointed upwards. "That kind, I should think."

Both Martha and Ranma followed the line of his finger, and their eyes widened in collective surprise. There, floating above them, maybe a thousand feet above the street, was a vast crystalline starship.

"Doctor?" Martha asked. "Who are they?"

"Them?" The Doctor asked, looking up at the ship. "They're someone who shouldn't be here. Just like our friend Ranma here. Now, maybe it's just that they're here to recover the wreck of the other ships that crashed here. Or maybe they've detected all that energy Ranma is putting out." He grinned. "Personally, I can't wait to find out which."

Ranma stared up at the ship. "No way," she said. Sure, Nerima was weird, but this was... ok, not that odd, if you substitute the flying ship for, say, a flying chariot with a Chinese prince inside looking for a bride. Still, now wasn't exactly a good time for an alien starship to show up.

And show up it did. The vast crystal ship dropped a good five hundred feet in the space of a second or two until it was hovering directly overhead, the wash of its unseen engines pouring down onto the streets below. On board the ship, Rubeus of the Black Moon clan stood at the helm as his scans narrowed in on the strange energy source he had detected.

"Source identified," the computer's voice said. The view screen zoomed in on the city below, and a young girl appeared on the screen. She didn't look like anything special. Dark hair, blue eyes, beautiful, very fit. Certainly none of these readings corresponded to anything from Crystal Tokyo, but still... the energy she was leaking appeared to have some of the same properties as the Time Vortex, and that was something unprecedented. He'd have to bring her aboard for analysis.

A flip of a switch activated the ship's transporter system. A crystal in the center of the command deck began to glow brightly.

"EXCUSE ME," called an amplified voice.

Rubeus blinked, and the view screen quickly zoomed in on a Japanese man in a police uniform speaking through a loudspeaker.

"EXCUSE ME, YOU IN THE SHIP, DO YOU HAVE A PERMIT TO BE FLYING AN INTERSTELLAR CRAFT IN NERIMAN AIRSPACE?"

Rubeus sweatdropped. A permit? What the hell was this? "Uh... what?" he asked, the ship's communications system broadcasting his voice down to the man.

"YOU MUST HAVE A PERMIT TO FLY AN INTERSTELLAR CRAFT THROUGH NERIMAN AIRSPACE, SIR. IF YOU DON'T HAVE ONE, I'M AFRAID I'LL HAVE TO WRITE YOU A CITATION."

Rubeus promptly blasted the policeman with a bolt of plasma from the ship's main gun.

"That was a bit unnecessary, wasn't it?" a voice asked from behind him.

Rubeus turned and immediately frowned. The girl had been brought aboard, but it seemed that two others had also been snagged in the transportation beam. Rubeus shrugged. No loss. He opened his hand and blasted both the Doctor and Martha with low-intensity energy bolts, sending them both flying a good three feet with the concussive force generated.

"HEY! You can't do that to them! They're just ordinary people!" Ranma yelled even as she turned to see if the two had survived.

"Yes, and thus are useless for my purposes. You, on the other hand..." Rubeus grinned, and twisted a dial on the control panel.

Immediately, a terrific invisible force crushed Ranma to the floor. "What the..." was all she had time to get out before being smashed flat. It felt as though her limbs were made of lead. "I... I can't move?"

The Doctor sat up and took stock of the situation. This didn't look good. Whoever their captor was, he had access to powerful technology. Nothing that couldn't be overcome, given time, but time didn't look like it was something they had a whole lot of just now. Still, he'd figure something out. "You coward," he snapped.

... or maybe he'd just enrage the hostile alien. Yes, that seemed like the thing to do. ... ok, so maybe he wasn't thinking as clearly as he should have been just then. You can hardly blame him. Ranma had confused him deeply.

Rubeus glanced the Doctor's way. "Coward?" he asked, looking vaguely insulted.

"Oh, sure," the Doctor said, "Big advanced alien picking on a little girl with your scary advanced technology. Must make you feel really powerful. But you and I, we know better, don't we? You're not much better than a school yard bully, are you?" As he spoke, he fiddled with the sonic screwdriver, using it to scan Rubeus's energy pattern.

"You're in no position to be insulting me, fool," Rubeus snapped. He clenched his fist, and an aura of power gathered around him.

The Doctor grinned.

--

Martha grimaced as she came to. She wasn't sure how much time had passed since the red-haired man with the black crescent moon on his forehead had blasted her and the Doctor with that raygun or whatever it had been, but... blasted with a raygun? "Doctor?" she asked worriedly, and sat up.

Her surroundings were much the same as they had been a moment earlier: the ship was crystal both inside and out, and she appeared to be on what served as the ship's bridge or control center. The red-haired man was currently pacing back and forth in front of... oh, right. In front of Ranma, who looked like she was trying (unsuccessfully) to move, with some invisible force holding her in place. Nearby – well, there was a thing she hadn't noticed earlier, though in her defense she hadn't really been afforded much time in which to notice – four teenaged girls in weird, semi-fetishistic versions of the female Japanese school uniform were bound to, their hands and feet merged into the structure of, crystalline crosses. And as for Martha herself: she stood within a small force bubble in front of the four crosses, with the Doctor lying unconscious not far away. He had injuries on him that he hadn't had before she'd lost consciousness - burns, mostly.

"Doctor!" Martha called insistently, and shook him.

The Doctor stirred faintly. "Now what does the radiation read, Susan?" he mumbled.

"Doctor?" Martha asked again.

He didn't speak again. He was still breathing, though, so Martha let him be for the moment. A voice was speaking somewhere nearby – Martha didn't recognize it.

"... very interesting readings, Rubeus. I can already see a number of ways in which this could be utilized. Whatever this energy is, it's closely tied to the Time Vortex."

Another voice replied: the voice of their captor, this 'Rubeus:' "I've already begun the extraction process, Safir." A pause. "Do you really think the energy contained in this girl could allow us to travel freely back and forth through time?"

A laugh. "Maybe. Maybe. My design is working well, I take it?"

"Well, it's working," Rubeus replied somewhat irritably. "But at this rate, it will take weeks to extract this power from the girl's cells."

"We can afford the wait. Better to have reliable means of travel in a few weeks than to continue to gamble on being able to evade Sailor Pluto each time we pass through the time/space tunnel. We lost several ships on our last trip."

Martha began to study the floor beneath her, looking for some way to disengage the energy shield. The floor was the same crystal structure as the rest of the ship, but there were conduits of energy flowing visibly through it, forming a circle that matched the energy barrier fairly closely. Then a glint of metal out of the corner of her eye brought Martha's attention to something lying just inside the energy field: the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. She'd seen the Doctor use it plenty of times. He'd even showed her how it worked not long ago. Not that she was an expert, but still, she knew enough that a plan began to form in her mind. Martha smiled. "Just you wait, Doctor," she said quietly. "You've saved me lots of times. Now it's my turn."

Brandishing the Doctor's sonic screwdriver for all it was worth, Martha went to work.

"Hey, you. Are you ok?"

Martha looked up. It was one of the girls on the crosses – this one had long, dark hair and a red skirt. "Hello," Martha said, and waved. "Just fine, thank you."

The girl blinked. "You're taking this pretty well."

Martha nodded, and continued fiddling with the sonic screwdriver around the base of the force field. If she could just find the correct frequency... the shield vanished.

The girl in the red skirt blinked in surprise. "How did you...?"

Martha felt a thrill of excitement. She had done it! She quickly rose to her feet and pulled the still unconscious Doctor out of the field. Once that was accomplished, she listened very carefully to see if Rubeus had heard the activity.

Nope. He was still talking with whoever that was. She walked over to the first of the crystalline crosses. All of the girls were watching her now, each of them silent, each of them looking at her with a thoroughly disbelieving look on their faces. "Now," Martha said, "Let's see if we can't figure out how these work."

There was a panel on the side of the cross with readouts, dials, and switches. Martha took a moment to study it.

"I hope you aren't just planning to fool around with the settings until something happens," the red-skirted girl whispered, a little alarmed. "Who knows what could happen?"

Martha raised a delicate eyebrow. "Would you prefer to stay stuck to that thing, then?"

The red-skirted girl looked pensive, then shook her head. "I guess it can't be any worse than what Rubeus has planned for us if we don't get away."

Martha nodded, and then went back to studying the panel. Damn. This was going to be difficult. There was no indication of how to deactivate the thing and release a person who was merged with the device. "If only there were a manual of some sort!" Martha hissed, quite frustrated. If only there were instructions!

The red-skirted girl shook her head. "Who would be stupid enough to leave a manual of operations next to a device like this?"

On the floor, the Doctor stirred once more.

Martha blinked. "Hold on a minute," she said. There was something resting in a little nook in a corner not far away from where she was standing: a book. She walked over to it and picked it up. There, printed right on the cover were the words: Crystal Cross Operator's Manual. 'Crystal Crosses and You: A how to guide for the storage, transport, and containment of mana positive threats.' She held it up, and the red-skirted Senshi looked somewhere between mortified and ready to laugh out loud. After taking a moment to make sure that Rubeus was still otherwise occupied, Martha opened the operator's manual and began to read.

--

Pain. Ranma's whole world had become this singular fact. Pain. Pain and constant pain. Her nerves were on fire, and she could only suppose that she was dying. Lying there on the floor in the area of drastically increased gravity, with a strange device placed above her firing some kind of energy beam into her chest, she felt every kind of pain she could think of: shooting pain, sharp stabbing pain, dull throbbing pain, horrible crushing pain, awful tearing pain, searing pain, blistering pain, aching pain, and of course, 'little bones in your ears that you hear about in anatomy class and never think about again having been broken' pain. That last one really was a peculiar and novel kind of pain, and Ranma had never experienced it before, but she had now, and she had Rubeus to thank for it. Naturally, she wished to express her gratitude to him for allowing her to experience such heretofore unknown forms of pain in a number of different but equally creative ways. Oh, wait, there was also lancing pain and creeping pain. She'd never felt those ones, either. She added several new ways to express her gratitude to her rapidly growing list.

The worst thing about it wasn't the pain, though: it was the helplessness. Ranma had never been helpless before - unless you count the ultimate weakness moxibustion point, but Ranma had often said of that particular incident that it 'didn't count,' so we won't - so this too was a novel experience, and not the sort of novel experience that she liked. What she needed to do was to somehow nullify or counteract the gravity field that was keeping her pinned. Initially Ranma had managed to get to her feet, but then the gravity field had been increased significantly, and once again she was rendered immobile. Since then, she'd been trying with little success to find a way to counteract this gravity field.

Suddenly, a new sensation intruded on her world of pain: the sound of an unkind voice. "I trust you are comfortable?" Rubeus – her captor – asked.

"Fine," Ranma managed to grind out as insolently as she could.

"Good to hear," Rubeus replied, and increased the gravity.

Ranma ground her teeth. OK, this was getting ridiculous. She needed to get out of here, and now. Maybe she could concentrate all her ki into strengthening her body to over... ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow what was she just thinking about? Pain on this level had a way of making coherent thought a difficult thing to have. Desperately, she embraced the soul of ice technique. Soul of ice. Soul of ice. Soul of OW, I mean ice. Ice. Ice. Ice. Ice. Ok, now she was in pain AND she felt cold. Still, she cared about the pain less now with her emotions dampened, so that was something. It let her think a little more clearly, at least. Let's see. What did she know? Well, she knew that strengthening her body with ki wouldn't work. That had been the first thing she'd tried, and she just couldn't make herself strong enough to resist the effect of this high gravity area. And what was gravity, anyways? Well, she knew that gravity was a way of describing the way that space and time bends around massive objects. With that in mind, how could she use her ki to counteract the effe... wait a minute, space and time bending around massive objects? Where had that come from? Still, it rang true to her, though she couldn't say why. So... maybe she could use her ki to create a kind of barrier around herself that would... resist bending? Kind of like light ki against heavy ki?

Movement. There it was, in her peripheral vision: that dark skinned foreigner, Martha, was free, and was... reading a book? Uh, right.

Rubeus was talking again. Or had he been talking all this time? There was another voice. Someone was talking to Rubeus. Ranma grimaced. This would be so much easier if she weren't in a state of agony, even one muted by the effects of the soul of ice technique.

'Oh shit,' she thought. 'He's turning around. He's turning around. He's going to see that chick!'

"Ya look pretty satisfied, Rubewhatever," Ranma sneered as insultingly as she could, "But I'm gonna wipe that smirk off your face!"

Rubeus turned his attention back to Ranma. "Although your body is unusually resistant to the increased gravitational field," he said, "Don't think that you're safe, girl. If I want to, I can crush every bone in your body. I may not be able to kill you and still extract this energy, but I can make your life even more miserable for the short time you have left."

"Pretty confident, ain'tcha," Ranma said.

Rubeus smirked. "You don't fool me. That field is amplifying the force of gravity around you. You're helpless as a kitten." Ranma flinched at the 'kitten' reference, but Rubeus didn't connect that with cats. "Do you really want me to make you suffer?"

Martha put the book down and fiddled with the controls on the side of the first crystal cross, and instantly, the first of those sailor suited girls was free! Ranma's hopes began to rise. Rubeus began to turn around again, but Ranma quickly spoke once more:

"Maybe I like pain," she said.

Rubeus raised an eyebrow, once again turning his attention back to the pig-tailed girl. "What a coincidence," he said. "I like pain, too. Inflicting it, that is." He grinned wickedly, and turned up the gravity again.

Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain! PAIN! God it hurt, crushing her to the floor, unable to move. Any more than this, and she'd be squished. Fortunately, the second of the four girls was now free, and Martha was already working at the third girl's cross, with the Doctor finally conscious and working at the fourth one himself.

Rubeus's grin widened. "Not so cocky now, are you?" he asked, lowering his hand from the gravity control module.

That was when Ranma acted: she concentrated as hard as she was able and forced her ki into a pattern she'd never attempted before, never even heard of before, but something she somehow knew corresponded to the energy pattern given off by an anti-gravity generator. How she knew, well, she didn't have the faintest idea, and that bothered her to no end, but she'd take it. It burned almost all of her ki reserves to do it, but she had to keep Rubeus distracted for a few more seconds, and she didn't see that there was any other choice: she sprang out of the field (and out of the beam of energy) and tackled the red-haired man.

Rubeus's eyes widened. "Impossible!" he yelled even as she knocked him to the ground.

Unfortunately, that was all the energy Ranma had, and she had a horrible, sinking sort of feeling that she might have actually damaged herself by forcing her ki into such an unnatural pattern. She didn't so much land on Rubeus as she collapsed on him.

The red-haired man rose to his feet, his face a picture of fury made visible. "You BITCH!" he hissed. "I don't know how you managed to resist the gravity generator, but it won't happen again. I'm going to break every bone in your body before we start again!" He opened his left hand, and a glowing ball of red energy formed upon his palm. "Now..."

Whatever he had been about to say was cut off, because at that moment, four battle-cries resounded through the ship:

"BURNING MANDALA!"  
"SPARKLING WIDE PRESSURE!"  
"SHINE AQUA ILLUSION!"

"VENUS LOVE-ME CHAIN!"

Rubeus's eyes widened in shock, and his shield flickered into being at the last possible second: the attacks blasted into the barrier full force, and as it had not yet stabilized, only about half of each blast was deflected. The rest went right into his body, and while he was very, very tough, he wasn't THAT tough: he went flying into the control console, which exploded in a shower of sparks.

A moment later, Martha, the Doctor, Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter were at Ranma's side.

"Ranma, can you walk?" the Doctor asked.

Ranma nodded. "Yeah, gimme a sec," she rose to her feet and immediately fell to her knees, the actions so close together that they seemed the same movement. Damn. She really had used all her energy. "Uh..."

One of the sailor suited girls – the one in green – spoke up. "I'll get her." She scooped Ranma up into her arms.

"Hey!" Ranma protested weakly. "I can walk on my..." she fainted in Jupiter's arms.

"Right then," The Doctor said, occasionally giving Ranma a strange, worried sort of look. "If you'd all just make your way to the teleportation pad, we'll get off of this ship."

They did. Light sprang up around them and they vanished, reappearing a moment later on the ground below.

A few seconds later, Rubeus clambered out of the wreck of the ship's primary control console thoroughly singed, blasted, electrocuted, half frozen, and very pissed off. "They will pay for this," he hissed.

--

Sailor Pluto has a hard job. You know, Gates of Time and all that. Not even hers, really. She guards them, of course, and does what she can to keep the timeline intact, which is a surprisingly difficult job, let me tell you. See, all things being equal, there wouldn't be any need for her intervention at all. Time flows from one point to another, everyone's choices feed into the Time Stream, and off it goes into the future. Right now in 2005, the Black Moon Clan was just gearing up to kidnap Chibi-Usa, which would bring about their defeat, both right now in 2005 and right now in the thirtieth century, little more than a footnote in the history of the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire.

Still, problems did come up when people started gallivanting all about through time. You know, like Egon says, 'Don't cross the streams.' It's bad. Really, really bad. On the plus side, time has several natural defenses against that sort of thing. Against paradoxes, that is. The first is just the fact that it's bloody hard to change the past. Most of the time, you go back in time because you were meant to, and whatever you do is just what already occurred. Changing things is hard, but it is possible, which brings us to the second defense: the infinite temporal flux. But how to explain the mechanics of the infinite temporal flux? Right. Here I'll just take my cue from the Doctor himself: it's like Back to the Future. When Marty prevents his own parents from meeting, time just sort of absorbs the paradox. Instead of Marty not having ever been able to go back to prevent their meeting in the first place, the future that Marty came from just sort of fades away, though slow enough for him to do something about it. That's one of Sailor Pluto's big jobs – making sure that people don't cross the time streams, and when they do, seeing to it that Crystal Tokyo doesn't just fade away in the aftermath. And it's a hard job, keeping a kingdom up and running in the face of that sort of fading. But the thing about the Infinite Temporal Flux is it's not a very large infinity. It can absorb paradox to an extent, but there's a threshold you can get to where it can't take any more. A paradox of sufficient size will create a kind of wound in time. That's when Time's own sort of immune system kicks in. Reapers. They're much harder to deal with. They tend to flood in and sterilize the wound, destroying both the source of the paradox and everything else in the vicinity. Once the cause of the paradox has been removed, things generally go back to normal. Back when the Time Lords were still around, it was pretty easy to keep things in order, since they were actively out there helping to repair paradox and keeping the universe running. Now, well, it's a bit more difficult.

As I was saying, right now in 2005, Rubeus was supposed to be gearing up to do a grand old battle with Sailor Moon. He'd already captured Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury in his ship, had already given his ultimatum to Sailor Moon (you know, give me the Ginzuishou and the Rabbit or your friends die in two hours). Sailor Moon was going to go onboard the ship with Chibi-Usa, they'd fight Rubeus, and they win. It's all very dramatic, underlining the power of love and justice and the triumph of idealism and various warm and happy feelings over hatred and anger and what not.

What certainly was **not** supposed to happen was the Doctor, Martha, and Ranma getting brought on board, rescuing the captured Senshi by themselves, smashing Rubeus's ship, and instigating an all out attack by the Black Moon fleet on the ward of Nerima.

Buildings were going up like tinderboxes as nearly a dozen Black Moon ships bombarded the Neriman cityscape from about a thousand feet up. The smell of ozone was thick in the air, mixed with the smell of burning buildings. People ran screaming in the streets: aliens was one thing, but being bombed by an alien fleet was quite another.

Pluto ground her teeth and went to work on the time tunnel, using a combination of her own power and Silver Millennium technology in a frantic attempt to prevent the paradox waves being generated by the attack on Nerima from creating a Space/Time breech in Crystal Tokyo. "Damnit, damn it, damn it, damn it, DAMN IT!" she hissed, said, yelled, and finally shouted. It wasn't supposed to happen like this! The only way it could have changed is if a time traveler from outside of the Black Moon time/space event had interfered on a huge level. The gates were open now, and they weren't supposed to be. A thousand possible futures flickered across their surface, some good, some bad, but none Crystal Tokyo. Then, for one shining moment, Crystal Tokyo itself was there on the surface of the entrance to the time-tunnel. Then, an old, rickety wooden blue police-box.

Sailor Pluto felt her stomach go cold at the sight of it in a way that an ordinary police box simply wouldn't cause. She ran a quick cross-temporal scan to make sure, and the results were precisely what she'd expected: this was a TARDIS. A TARDIS without a functioning chameleon circuit. "Time-lord!" she hissed. And not just any Time-lord: there was only one of them that she knew of who tended to involve himself in the affairs of Earth, interfering countless times across history, polluting the Time Stream with his touch. Only one whose TARDIS carried the shape of a London police box no matter where it went. Still, she didn't have time to take action against him, and changing the past was forbidden to her. If she was to prevent the time/space breech, it would be a long, long night.

Damn but she wished she were drunk.

Meanwhile, back in Nerima, the attack continued, and now, droids were on the streets in force, blasting everything in sight. The citizens of Nerima were fighting back, and while they could hold their own acainst the droids, it's hard to fight back against being bombarded from above, even if you're a master of Martial Arts tea ceremony, or Martial Arts figure skating, or even the Saotome School of Indiscriminate Grappling.

--

"Bastards," Ranma muttered, staring across the destruction which had been visited on Nerima in the five minutes since their escape to the surface.

Another blast of concentrated plasma struck a building nearby and detonated violently.

"Anyone have any ideas?" one of the sailor suited girls - the one in the fuku with the gold trim - asked, staring up at the distant shapes of the Black Moon fleet.

The other sailor suited girls shook their heads, and the one in blue said, "We can't do much at this distance. Maybe if we had Sailor Moon with us we could try a Sailor Teleport, but..."

"Right then," the Doctor said. "I'm the Doctor." He gestured towards Martha and Ranma in turn. "That's Martha, and this is Ranma."

The sailor suited girls each exchanged looks of surprise, and then introduced themselves as Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter.

A single black moon ship began to descend, approaching their position rapidly, its weapons charging.

The Doctor nodded as if he had expected as much. "Pleased to meet you. Now, unless anyone wants to get blasted by the ship that's about to fire on us, let's run for our lives." Neither he nor Martha missed a beat, but immediately began running for cover, each of them grinning wildly.

Ranma and the Sailor Senshi exchanged startled glances, and then sprinted off after the two.

Two seconds later, the spot they had been standing exploded beneath a volley of plasma impacts.

They ran for about two blocks before a group of droids swarmed into view from around a corner. While they'd been running, the Senshi had called for backup on their communicators, but their allies were a long way from Nerima.

Even as the droids approached, the Senshi let loose with their attacks, sending blasts of magical energy aligned to the elements of electricity, water, fire, and metal into the ranks of the artificial monsters.

Battle was joined. For a solid minute Ranma lost herself in the joy of the fight, ducking over improbable attacks, dodging blows, snapkicking droids into lamp posts, weaving through her opponents like water through rapids.

Martha could only stop and stare. Then she noticed a droid coming towards her and the Doctor. "Doctor!" she said in warning.

He produced his Sonic Screwdriver and pointed it at the thing. There was a high pitched whine, and then...

Nothing happened.

The Droid kept charging.

"Doctor?" Martha said, concern only now entering her voice.

The Doctor frowned and began to fiddle with the sonic screwdriver's controls. "Must not have matched the right power frequency... let's see..." he thought for a moment, "Maybe if I reverse the polarity of the neutron flow..."

The droid was nearly on top of them now, an only vaguely mechanical woman-shaped creature with green hair and mirror-like eyes. "DIE!" it shouted.

"DOCTOR!"

Ranma was there, power crackling around her body in spite of her state of near total ki-depletion, grabbing the droid by the arms and wrenching it backwards, away from the two. "Oh no ya don't," she hissed through clenched teeth.

In ordinary circumstances, she wouldn't have had as much trouble against the thing, but now, near the point of exhaustion and fresh from being tortured and having depleted most of her ki reserves, it was all she could do to keep it from plowing into the Doctor and Martha.

The Doctor visibly brightened. "Of, of course!" he exclaimed, then fiddled with the settings on his device. "I had it set to drive screws of all things," he said in reply to Martha's questioning look. Then he pointed his sonic screwdriver at the droid and activated it.

Instantly, the droid went limp and fell forward onto its face, taking a very surprised Ranma down with it.

By then, the Senshi had cleaned up the other droids in the street, and another plasma blast detonated nearby.

Martha reached down to help Ranma to her feet, but the pigtailed girl stubbornly refused the help, struggling to her feet on her own. "... Nice move, uh, Doc," he said.

"Doctor," the Doctor corrected.

"Uh, right."

The Doctor briefly surveyed the group, and then nodded to himself. "Right then. This way." He gestured theatrically down the road towards what was left of Furinkan High School, still burning in the distance. "Come on. Allonse," he called over his shoulder as he walked off down the street.

The others followed.

Above, the bombardment continued, and Ranma's heart clenched. At this rate, Nerima would be a pile of rubble within the hour.

Ten minutes of walking and another brief fight with a band of droids found the group rounding the street corner at last at the very entrance to Furinkan High School, only to come face to face with... an old style phone booth of some kind?

Mercury raised an eyebrow. She knew enough history to know what this was, even if she didn't know why it would be here. "A London Police Box?" she asked.

The other Senshi gave her a confused look.

"A what?" Jupiter asked.

"Right," the Doctor said. "Martha. Ranma. It's time to go."

Ranma blinked. Her limbs felt like they were made out of water. Really really painful water. It was tiring even to keep walking at this point, but she was still aware enough to be surprised by the Doctor's announcement. She looked the police box up and down, and though there was something naggingly familiar about it, she had other things on her mind. "Whaddya mean, 'time ta go?'" she asked, thoroughly confused.

"Just that. Time to go. You can't stay here."

Martha looked at the Doctor questioningly.

Ranma stared at the Doctor, her confusion obvious on her face. Exhausted or not, in pain or not, she wasn't about to go anywhere. Not that there was an anywhere to go to. "Look, Doctor, or whoever ya are," she snapped, "I ain't about ta leave these girls to fight against those things alone. Those ships are blowin' up the whole damn city!"

The Doctor looked annoyed. "Ranma. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But these ships are attacking because of us. Because of you, because of me, and because of Martha. More to the point, they're going to be able to detect you wherever you go thanks to the energy you're giving off, and they'll track you wherever you go. You're valuable to them, and that's a very dangerous thing to be."

The Senshi kept silent, looking between Ranma, the Doctor, and Martha. Mercury, meanwhile, produced her computer and began to scan to see if she could confirm whether or not Ranma was giving off some form of exotic energy.

Ranma shook her head. None of that made any sense, and besides, she couldn't leave... Akane. "I ain't leavin'," she said stubbornly.

"Listen to the Doctor, Ranma," Martha chided.

"I might not be the smartest guy in the world," Ranma said, and the others blinked in surprise at the use of the word 'guy,' "But I know when I got a thing worth fightin' for. I ain't gonna leave because if I did, then... then... Akane, Ukyou, Shampoo, Kasumi, Nabiki, they'd all be..."

Mercury looked up from her computer in surprise. "... He's right," she announced. "She really is giving off an exotic energy signature, and now that I know what to look for..." She punched in a few variables to isolate the signal, and her eyes widened even further.

"What?" Mars asked. "What is it?"

"... Minna, I think they can track this from anywhere in the world..." she said.

Ranma sank into herself. "But..."

The Doctor smiled gently. "I understand. You've got people you care about. But the best thing you can do for them is leave. If you go, these aliens will follow. We can lead them away from this place."

Ranma grimaced. Could she really leave Akane behind? Could she really leave all her friends and family? Something inside her whispered to trust this man. To believe him. She didn't know what to make of that, but there it was. "If you're wrong..."

"I'm not wrong," the Doctor insisted. He sounded supremely confident.

"Sailor Mercury confirmed it, didn't she?" Venus asked. "If she says so, then..." she trailed off, a look of pity in her eyes as she looked at Ranma.

"Besides," Martha said quietly, pitching her voice so as not to carry beyond herself, the Doctor, and Ranma, "The TARDIS is a time machine. If it doesn't work, we can just come back to the instant after we left. Right, Doctor?"

The Doctor nodded.

Damnit, was she really going to listen to this? This was crazy. This was... normal. Damnit. With the way things worked in Nerima, it sounded about right. Like every other freak who found his or her way to Nerima, these aliens would inevitably end up following Ranma wherever she went. ... she swallowed her pride, and nodded stiffly.

"Right then," the Doctor said, and quickly opened the TARDIS. "Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, always a pleasure."

The four guardian senshi blinked at that.

"We've met before?" Mercury asked.

The Doctor grinned a boyish sort of grin, and ducked inside the TARDIS. Martha and Ranma followed a moment later.

Ranma's eyes widened even as she stepped through the door. The inside was bigger than the outside! She voiced this thought, of course: "The inside is bigger than the outside!"

The Doctor nodded absently, heading over to the center of the room and began fiddling with the controls.

"Takes a while to get used to," Martha said as she shut the doors behind Ranma.

"This is, uh, some kinda ship?" Ranma asked. It seemed familiar, somehow. She couldn't explain it exactly, but something about it... but that was impossible.

A shudder went through the vessel as they lifted off from the surface of the Earth. The Doctor promptly fiddled with a few controls, and the very angry face of Rubeus appeared on the view screen. "Hello!" the Doctor said cheerfully.

"YOU!" Rubeus all but yelled.

"Me," the Doctor said, and then gestured to his companions. "Martha and Ranma, too." He turned to Martha. "In all the universe, there is one taunt that is hated and feared above every other. This one can send a Judoon platoon into a blood rage, boil the blood of a Sebacian, and short-circuit the emotional limiter of a Cyberman." It was hard to tell if he was being serious or not. The Doctor turned to the screen, held up his hands on either side of his face, thumbs against his cheeks and each finger extended and said, "Nya nya nya nya nya nya," in a sing song voice.

Rubeus's face grew red, and before he could speak, the Doctor shut down the view screen. The entire Black Moon fleet then zoomed off in hot pursuit of the TARDIS.

Up, up, up into the sky they went, rapidly passing the point that Ranma had attained under tomboy, P-chan, and flying alien assisted flight. Up, up, higher, higher, out into space, with the Black Moon ships flying close behind, firing wildly at the retreating TARDIS.

"Everyone hold onto something," the Doctor said. "Next stop, the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire!" He slammed a fist down onto a weird plunger-like device, and the a high pitched, pulsing sort of whine of the TARDIS in transit filled the room.

The TARDIS vanished into the time-vortex just before a dozen energy beams crossed the space it had occupied.

On board his ship, Rubeus cursed and pounded the secondary control console with his fist. "They think they can escape so easily?" he asked. Let's see. The readings indicated that the ship had gone to... wait a minute. Crystal Tokyo? It had gone THERE? Why had it gone there? Rubeus grinned. That made things much simpler. He activated his own ship's time circuit, and the whole crystalline starship vanished into thin air.

END CHAPTER 2

--

Author's notes: Revised


End file.
